the end of typewriting

Now that the making of typewriters has come to an end, nostalgia is setting in. I am not wholly immune to it. I still have warm memories of the Smith-Corona Slient I used throughout college and most of graduate school — in fact, it’s safely stored in my basement, in its original case. I used it happily, looking with scorn on those who had moved to electric machines, until it was time for me to write a dissertation, at which point I made a clear-eyted assessment of the work involved, took out a loan, and bought the original Macintosh.

But I’m not feeling the nostalgia as much as I might have expected, I think because, if I’m going to go old-school, I might as well go all the way and return to pen and notebook. Perhaps it’s life with an iPad that has weakened my affection, but I keep thinking that a typewriter ties me to one place, like a desktop computer — I can’t exactly bring it to the local coffee shop and start banging away. (Though I wonder what would happen if I did. . . .) It’s true that I could type something out, scan it to PDF, and use OCR software to turn it to digital text, whereas it’s unlikely that any OCR program will ever be able to read my handwriting; but that options isn't enough to sway me. If I’m going to be a hipster manqué, I’ll do it with a Moleskine rather than the old Smith-Corona.

So I’m accepting offers for the typewriter on which I wrote so much. I’d part with it — not without a tear, I suspect — for the right price.

P.S. It seems the making of typewriters has not come to an end.

honoring Olivetti

More here. 

Self, typing

Will Self on his writing practices:

Self, who prefers to write his fiction on a typewriter, adds that his daily word count is lower than it used to be, "partly because I shifted to the Imperial Good Companion, which is a slower machine, about four or five years ago. Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it." Joan Didion once told an interviewer that she used to retype her whole draft every morning to get back in the rhythm. "I'm not that good a typist," Self says incredulously. "I'd aim to write, on a first draft, not a great amount any more, only about 1,200 words a day. I write the book through. And then I start rewriting it, in successive waves."

I’ve been telling myself for years that I’m going to take out the old Smith-Corona that I used all through college and most of grad school and . . . nah. Not gonna happen.